"Gorbachev's political views were more audacious. Unlike Deng Xiaoping, who, after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, was obsessed with stability and ruled out democratic reforms, Gorbachev linked perestroika with a policy of glasnost (openness). Taking aim at the USSR's encrusted ruling party and bureaucracy, Gorbachev adopted a stillborn project of Andropov's to reduce their power by introducing new- even Western- ideas into the Soviet environment and engaging the Soviet population in modernizing the country. He went so far as to authorize the opening of the records of Soviet history, including its darkest moments, which ignited an explosion of criticism reaching back to Lenin's rule. To be sure, Gorbachev's purpose was to preserve the communist system by revitalizing it from above, but by combining perestroika with glasnost the Soviet leader risked unleashing forces he was ultimately unable to control. Gorbachev was even more daring in his foreign policy because he believed that the relaxation of international tensions was indispensable to his political reforms at home. Convinced that the Soviet Union's greatest threat was nuclear war but that its huge military budget was unsupportable, he intended to achieve security by scaling down the global rivalry between Moscow and Washington and reviving détente. After assembling a group of like-minded liberal internationalists, among them the new foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and his foreign policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev boldly embarked on a step-by-step program of reducing the USSR's isolation and reaching out to the other side, which included Western Europe, Japan, and China as well as the United States."